[Mellow_Labs] wanted an Everything Presence Lite but found it was always out of stock. Therefore, he decided to create his own. The kit uses a millimeter wave sensor as a super-sensitive motion tracker for up to three people. It can even read your heart rate remotely. You can see a video of the project below.
There are a few differences from the original kit. Both use the C4001 24 GHz human presence detection sensor. However, the homebrew version also includes a BME680 environmental sensor.
You know how you can feel when someone is looking at you? Thanks to a person detector, [Michael Rigsby’s] little robotic light switch also knows when you are looking at it. As you can see in the video below, when it notices you are looking at it, it lights up an LED. If you continue to gaze at it, it will turn to stare back at you. Keep staring it down and it will toggle the state of a remote control light switch.
This all works because of the person sensor module by Useful Sensors. The little module has a camera and face detection built into it. It doesn’t draw much power at 150 milliwatts. It can sense faces, including where they are and how many people are looking.
Continue reading “The Eyes Have It: Stare Down Your Lighting”
We have a soft spot for devices that subvert purpose and expectation, and that definitely sums up [Guy Dupont]’s Clock That Is Wrong. It knows the correct time, but whether or not it displays the correct time is another story. That’s because nestled just above the 7-segment display is a person sensor module, and when it detects that a person is looking towards it, the clock will display an incorrect time, therefore self-defeating both the purpose and primary use case of a clock in one stroke.
The person sensor is a tiny board with tiny camera that constantly does its best to determine whether a person is in view, and whether they are looking towards the sensor. It’s a good fit for a project like this, and it means that one can look at the clock from an oblique angle (meaning one is out of view of the sensor) and see the correct time. But once one moves in front of it, the time changes. You can watch a brief video of it in action in this Twitter thread.
One interesting bit is that [Guy] uses an ESP32-based board to drive everything, but had some reservations about making a clock without an RTC. However, he found that simply syncing time over the network every 10 minutes or so using the board’s built-in WiFi was perfectly serviceable, at least for a device like this.
This reminds us a little of other clocks with subtly subversive elements, like the Vetinari Clock which keeps overall accurate time despite irregularly drifting in and out of sync. Intrigued by such ideas? You’re not alone, because there are even DIY hobby options for non-standard clock movements. Adding the ability to detect when someone is looking directly at such a device opens up possibilities, so keep it in mind if it’s time for a weekend project.
